Zwift in the Time of Quarantine
I first joined Zwift in 2015. I did a handful of rides over the 2015-2016 winter season before cancelling my subscription. I hated it. The virtual riding wasn’t interesting enough to keep me motivated, and I hated the forced social aspect. I don’t appreciate random men jumping on my wheel in real life, why would I want that in a game? I hated having to see the commentary of other people riding by me. I retreated back to erg mode on my Kickr app and intervals powered by a playlist blasted over a bluetooth speaker.
Quarantine changed things. Suddenly, everyone around me was into Zwift again. In March, I started getting emails that a local park racing series was moving to Zwift. I had a miserable winter of burnout, and just as racing outside got cancelled, I was more interested in bikes that I had been in years. It was time to give Zwift my credit card again.
I started my first Zwift race in late March. It’s been a decade since I’ve been dropped that hard. The Zwift start—where you wind up to zone 6 in the 10s before the gun goes off, then shoot out of the gate—was actually pretty intuitive to me, but I was not expecting to have to go so hard for so long. I planned for a cyclocross start, as hard as you can until the first turn, but then the turn never came. The time lag of drafting, again, didn’t really surprise me, but that didn’t stop me from getting completely messed up by it and, ultimately, shot out the back after 10 minutes of bobbing at the tail of the group.
It took a while to get used to the numbers. My w/kg is low. Lower than I want it to be, lower than most of my friends. This isn’t a secret. I weigh less than the average American woman, but am still heavy for an endurance athlete. After my first two Zwift races, I thought about quitting in frustration, but it was early April at this point. The world was really bleak. I was largely confined to my house. The specter of coronavirus in New York City was so great that I, and most of the people around me, were too afraid to ride our bikes outside. So I stuck with Zwift.
I treated it more like a new discipline than a different version of road racing, and I’ve slowly adapted to its rhythms. After getting crushed in a couple of the locals only races, I branched out and did more open group rides and races. I learned the vicissitudes of virtual pack riding, and I don’t really get dropped so much anymore. Once I got used to it, Zwift turned out to be much more like racing on the road than I expected. Although I suck at climbing (also true in real life), my raw power is pretty good, and that counts for something on the flats and even slight inclines. I’m a solid B racer, with the potential for a good result in relatively flat races, and bringing up the rear on the hills. I’m still figuring out how to sprint. On the road I have a great pop that I can’t really make work on the trainer. I’ve gone too early, I’ve gone too late. One of these days I’ll figure it out.
Zwift is far from a perfect experience. The UX is terrible, and no function is intuitive. You have to have two apps and two different screens to make it work properly. Most of the settings require extensive trial and error (or asking someone else) to figure out how to change. The fealty to binary gender norms and obsession over w/kg are are pretty harmful for anyone who isn’t skinny, cis and hetero. My partner recently suggested that avatars should be animals instead of people, and I agree that would be more fun. In short, it’s not a better or more idealistic world than the real one. But, it’s also my only way to be social on my bike, so for the moment I’ll take what I can get.
Once I let myself get into riding Zwift, I got into riding Zwift. I actively want to ride the trainer. I stay on it for more than 60 minutes, something I’ve never been able to make myself do in the past. Because you get experience points (XP) towards increasing your level for every kilometer ridden (you get more for riding in metric, because miles are dumb), I frequently ride extra just to eek out a few more points. Extra minutes! Voluntarily! On the trainer! I rode for almost three hours on the trainer over the weekend, just because I want to unlock some virtual ceramic pulley wheels for my virtual bike—something I don’t know why I care about, because I certainly do not care about real ceramic pulley wheels. The truth is, once I started treating Zwift as a game, rather than a replacement for riding and racing outside, it became really fun for me.
It helps that a lot of my teammates and friends are into it, too. I would never, on my own, decide to ride the 80+ hours it’s going to take me to finish the #EveryZwiftRouteTBD challenge, but it has been so fun to do it with my teammates. Zwift challenges and races give me something to talk about with friends that isn’t the overwhelmingly depressing news. I feel connected to the cycling community, even though group riding and racing is still off limits, especially in New York City.
Zwift, for all its issues, ultimately has been one of the only things that has helped me feel less alone through the pandemic, and I’m really grateful for that. See you out on the virtual road.
